Line object scene generation apparatus

Abstract

A system for recording and displaying a time-sequential scene on a computer comprising a digital camera, an image timer, and a main control computer. The digital camera transmits a sequence of digital image frames to the timer representative of the image of a body passing a plane in space. Each frame represents a line object of the body, thus forming a fractional part of the scene. Once the frame reaches the image timer, it is digitally marked with a time reference and buffered into a block of information. The main control computer stores blocks of information from the image timer for a variety of processing and features available to the user. The invention also provides a compression system for compressing a sequence of digital image frames for storage into a selected memory, preferably a virtual memory subsystem, or hard-disc drive. Preferred constructions for adjusting camera pixel processing of light values, time-marking the images, creating color palettes for interactive viewing of color images, and video data coding to accommodate the high volume of line image data are described.

What is claimed is: 
     
       1. An event recording video camera comprising optical means for imaging a visual field;   a line sensor for converting a fixed line portion of the imaged visual field into electrical signals representative of a line of pixels of the image of said field, the line of pixels constituting a frame representative of said fixed line portion at an instant in time;   circuit means in said camera for processing said electrical signals to form a digital output stream containing digitized pixel values of a sequence of frames at a high scanning rate;   a buffer for storing said digital output stream before transmission; and   compression means for compressing data in said buffer to reduce bandwidth thereof before it is transmitted.   
     
     
       2. An event recording camera according to claim 1, further comprising selection means responsive to contents of the buffer for selecting a compression mode, said selection means selecting a first mode of compression when said buffer is relatively empty, and selecting a second mode of compression when said buffer is relatively full, said second mode compressing more than said first mode. 
     
     
       3. A video camera according to claim 2, wherein one of said compression modes includes line to line differencing compression. 
     
     
       4. A video camera according to claim 2, wherein said compression means includes noise band quantization means, for compressing two digitized pixels that differ only by a threshold noise amount to a single compressed value. 
     
     
       5. A video camera according to claim 2, wherein said compression mode includes frame to frame predictive coding. 
     
     
       6. A video camera according to claim 2, wherein said pixel values include color values and said compression mode compresses values for each color separately.